Summarised by Centrist
Andrew Coster, the former Police Commissioner, says he briefed both Chris Hipkins and Mark Mitchell about the Jevon McSkimming allegations well before the timeline each insists on.
Coster told Q&A he “briefed the then Minister of Police Chris Hipkins” in 2022 in the back of a car travelling through the South Island.
He said he explained that McSkimming had an affair with a “much younger woman”, that the relationship had “soured badly”, and that she was emailing “all sorts of people with allegations about him”.
Hipkins rejected this outright, saying “I was never briefed” and that McSkimming “would never have been appointed” if he had known the details later documented in the IPCA report.
Coster also disputed Mitchell’s timeline, saying “there is no way I was only just telling him about this in my last couple of weeks in the job” and that they had spoken informally “through 2024”. Mitchell said the claim was “unfathomable”, arguing that Coster’s recollections had been found “inconsistent and unreliable” in the IPCA process. Mitchell is calling the former commissioner’s account “absolute utter nonsense” and insisting he only learned the details in November.
The conflict escalated after revelations that 36 emails containing allegations about McSkimming were diverted away from the minister’s office under an internal protocol. Mitchell said he never saw them and that police staff in his office were put in an “awful situation” by instructions that came from Coster’s leadership team.
Coster denied knowing any such system existed and insisted there was “no way in the world” agency staff could block a minister from seeing their own correspondence.
Read more over at RNZ, The NZ Herald, and 1News
